Walter Stuempfig Jr. was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1914.  He studied at the University of Pennsylvania prior to enrolling at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1931. Stuempfig spent three years at the Academy under Henry McCarter, Daniel Garber and Francis Speight.  In 1934 he won the Academy's Cresson Scholarship for travel abroad.
Described as a "Romantic Realist," Stuempfig painted still lifes, portraits, landscapes and street scenes of Cape May, Philadelphia, and the Italian cities of Naples and Milan. He attained a national reputation when his self-portrait was featured on the cover of Life magazine.  In 1948 he became an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a position he retained until his death in 1970.
Stuempfig was awarded a Silver Medal and the W.A. Clark Prize in 1947 from the Corcoran Gallery of Art Biennial, a prize from the National Academy of Design in 1953 and grants from the Ford Foundation and the American Institute of Arts and Letters.  He was elected an Academician of the National Academy of Design and was a member of the Century Association. 
He exhibited extensively at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, National Academy of Design, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, M.H. DeYoung Memorial Museum, Fort Worth Art Association, Birmingham Museum of Art and in England. 
His paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Buffalo Museum, Chicago Museum of Art, Springfield Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, Toledo Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art and the St. Louis Museum of Art, among many others.